Domain Penalty Transfer via Redirect - WV Flooring
-
Hello Moz-folks,
We are doing SEO for a Calgary based company - westvalleyflooring.com
The domain was ranking really poorly (even though the website was structured quite well). This lead me to believe that it was penalized for poor links. I redirected the domain to westvalleyflooring.ca
We also improved the website structure and content. We began building citations, and eventually, after a few months, it made into page #1.
Unfortunately, after the last pinguin update, the domain virtually disappeared. We waited, but it did not become re-indexed. I elected to change the domain yet again to floorscalgary.com
That domain has now been indexed, but is on page #7. We are building citations for it, but it is a little daunting because it is so far back. Right now, the redirets look like this:
westvalleyflooring.com --> westvalleyflooring.ca --> floorscalgary.com
Should it go like this:
westvalleyflooring.com --> floorscalgary.com
westvalleyflooring.ca --> floorscalgary.com
Do you agree with my decision to change the domain?
Thanks,
Anton
-
In this particular case, I did not see a penalty assigned in Webmaster tools.
Do you think that going back to westvalleyflooring.com would be a good call?
floorscalgary.com temporarily ranked on page #2 or #3 and has now fallen back.
This account has been a big challenge. -
Very likely you are just redirecting the penalty to the new domain. This article recently written by Marie Haynes may help.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain
hello there, I have a 12 years old domain with 35pa and similar domain authority pointed to my hosting which I will call domain A. in December 2020 I will lose the control domain A, as the person controlling the domain died and trying to find a solution but is not possible as it's far more complicated than I anticipated, the domain might be retained by someone else and not me. so I purchased a new domain I will call Domain B. my plan is to serve the info hosted from both domains but B as a principal, I think I can do a 301 in domain A but i wish still be visible in the URL until last minute. but i want to start to pass as soon as possible all the link juice. my problems is how can i serve the content from both domains without creating a 301 but and still be able passing juice link from A to B? is this possible? and from google getting all the indexation for Domain B. bot not for A
Local SEO | | fabguy0 -
Is using meta refresh as a redirect method bad for our SEO?
Our CMS creates Call-To-Action buttons that use a meta refresh to redirect and MOZ stops it's crawl. The MOZ crawler hits these redirects and is unable to pass to the desired URL and so reports issues. So could this be happening to other crawlers or will most indexing be unaffected by this method? Essentially, is using meta refresh as a redirect method bad for our SEO?
Local SEO | | BLUEvennMOZ0 -
Handling redirects when 2 companies merge
I am working with 2 local businesses that are joining forces to create 1, new business. Both individually hold consistent position 1 and 2 in Google for the majority of their chosen terms. However, the merger will see a new brand name and therefore a fresh out of the box domain. I have suggested setting up a partition on the hosting for both old URLS. All that will be hosted there would be .htaccess files with 301s to the like-for-like pages on the brand new domain / website. This will obviously also aid UX. However, is this overkill? I personally think not... but would a domain level 301 redirect work just as well from preserving / passing on any authority to the new URL.
Local SEO | | AbsoluteDesign1 -
How Can i improve Domain "Moz rank and Domain moz trust".
Good Evening , I have few quick questions for you . Please find the attachment . 1.) How can i improve Moz rank and domain Moz trust ? 2.) if you see the numbers , Mine is 0 external links and 0 followed root links domains , How can i work on it to improvise my stats ? 3.) Mine domain is dental clinic ( dentalxyz.net ) , there are other dentalxyz.com and dentalxyz.ca . When i type my my domain name it's shows irrelevant information like other location office. In addition , my youtube channel and facebook name is also different , It's not showing on google search. 4.) I'm trying to upgrade my old nice to new niche. how can i use this moz keyword tool? Where can i use that keywords. 5.) Has anybody tried buying back links from blackhatworld ? Fkmu4am
Local SEO | | hemantt0 -
Another Keyword Driven Domain Question
So we have a client that has a ton of great links, solid social profiles, content with good keyword-to-content ratio (7.5-9%), etc. This site has been around for a while and performed well. Recently a new competitor showed up with a very long keyword driven domain and has been outranking our client (and everyone else) for a large quantity of keywords. We own a keyword driven domain that could be used, but should we switch? I am always for branded domains vs keyword, but in this case it appears to be working and undefeatable. We have waited for 6 months to see if it's a fluke, but it has only gained additional ranking. The site in question has bad backlinks, many spam items, and stuffed content on the homepage. We will not copy that format obviously, but should we take one more step and beat him at his own game? Our client has Yext Premium, MOZ local, AdWords, social paid campaigns, location targeting pages, fast load time, etc. Overall a good presence. He seems stuck around the 3-5 position on page one, and is looking to push into the top 3 consistently.
Local SEO | | David-Kley1 -
Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?
A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam. The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites. What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer. Thanks!
Local SEO | | RedKeyDesigns0 -
Using hreflang on multiple domains when one has been penalized
Hi, I have two sites. One is a new .co.uk site which contains duplicate information to a .ie site. Currently, if I do a search for the company name in Google.co.uk it returns the .ie site. The .co.uk site needs some localisation done and some links (really is brand new). I was going to place hreflang tags as follows on both sites:- The order would flip for the .co.uk site from the above order. However, just to make things interesting, the .ie site was hit by Penguin and it hasn't recovered yet (and won't recover for another few months while I fix the issues). So the question is, what should I do? Do I go ahead an let Google know for sure that these sites are linked despite one of them having been penalized? Or do I let Google think that there is a .co.uk site with duplicate content to another .ie site?
Local SEO | | Serpstone0 -
Removing Sub Domain & Improving Page Performance
Hello Moz folks, This question is about my main website: www.web3.ca
Local SEO | | Web3Marketing87
(run on joomla) I just noticed a very strange occurrence - when I add ANY subdomain to the home page, it still resolves to the home page. example: test3.web3.ca Can this be bad for SEO, and is there a way to eliminate this? Second Question: Do you think there are two many outgoing links on the home page of Web3? Could reducing the number of links improve the home page's performance & rank? Thanks
Anton0